Gruner, Elioth

Elioth Gruner was born in 1882 in Gisborne, New Zealand. He arrived in Sydney in 1883 and died there in 1939.

Gruner was a painter who began his studies at Julian Ashton’s, Sydney in 1894 at the age of twelve. He started at Ashton’s as an assistant and in 1913 began to exhibit at the New South Wales Society of Artists.

Later he exhibited in London at the Royal Academy and at Paris at the New Salon.

Gruner’s paintings of green rolling pastures and farmyard animals, seen through the dewy mists of early morning, made him one of the most successful and popular painters of the 1910-38 period. Style and colours reflected Gruner’s mixed Norwegian and Irish parentage.

He won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting seven times, and in 1921 was commissioned by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales to paint a large picture, The Valley of the Tweed, which was painted entirely in the open air and took four months to complete. In his landscapes of rolling hills and pastures, he favoured the cool blues, greens and greys of winter.

As a leading member of the Australian Art Association and the NSW Society of Artists, he managed the exhibition of Australian art arranged through the Society of Artists for showing at the Royal Academy, London, in 1923.

An exhibition of his work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1983 and his work was included in Swiss Artists in Australia, AGNSW 1991; The Great Australian Art Exhibition 1788-1988.

AWARDS: Wynne Prize, 1916, 1919, 1921, 1929, 1934, 1936, and 1937.

REPRESENTED: National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Art Gallery of Western Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Queensland Art Gallery; Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory; Queen Victoria Art Gallery and Museum; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; many regional galleries as well as other public collections.